Month: December 2013

Earlier today I tweeted: “1 of my fav albums of 2013 was the flash drive @NarcoIris gave me, another was the Jai Paul leak/bootleg/thing. Legit releases r 4 amateurs” — aphorisms aside, let’s dive into some notable vibrations from 2013.

Before discussing other people’s music (& some books), brief thoughts on my own–

Performing the Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner with gifted musicians Emily Manzo, David Friend, and Arooj Aftab was great — I learned so much, and can’t wait until our performances resume in 2014 so I can return to that overwhelming sound, signals sent from Eastman in the late 70s received in the here & now.

Big thanks to TimeOut Chicago + Other Music for including the album in their ‘Best of 2013’ lists. Working with the excellent New Amsterdam label was above & beyond –know that if you buy the album, you’re supporting the right people. This video explains the JEMD project, with footage from its NYC debut at MoMA PS1:

+The most incredible thing I heard all year, hands down, is “Allemande” from my NewAm label-mate Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices. She won a Pulitzer for this EP, which is crazy — who would have expected the Pulitzer committee to actually have good taste?! “Allemande” is A LOT, every time you hear it the angles shift and new surprise enters the world, beauty, voices in your head. Have a listen:

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I’ve known Roberto ‘Helado Negro’ Lange for a minute now, but it wasn’t until after I saw him perform in LA this fall that I had opportunity to listen to his new album, Invisible Life, and from then on it kept growing and growing with Deep Personal Significance. This did, for me, what a great album traditionally does — becomes something you live with, return to, share.

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The most head-exploding moment of pop came from Kanye West’s “New Slaves” premier, projected simultaneously at 66 locations around the world. Much was made of Beyoncé’s marketing genius (hey, you’re famous — let your fans promote the album for you!), much was made of Jay-Z’s grimly efficient Samsung deal, and much was made of Ye’s bigheadedness — itself a shrewd marketing strategy. But kicking off his album with this Wiley-inspired bass mix/devils mix of a song, which was then amplified into circulation via grainy lo-fi cellphone video capture and remained (for a few months) unbuyable — great! Distributional aesthetics, people. Interesting that the minimalist bass mix, one of grime’s many early 2000 radicalisms, only enters pop a decade later (and fleetingly at that), while the wobble and shudder of bro-step lept into EDMainstream within the span of a few seasons.

On a related note, Steven Shaviro’s chapter/essay on Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal video is a must read for anybody thinking about feminism and the female body in pop culture and/or afrofuturism.

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Did you check the Bangladesh mixtape?? So Many Sound Ideas.

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Here’s a diagram which explains how I was thinking about music in 2013:

DJ Mustard Rashad Becker

It’s a spectrum. Shades not binaries. Reason presets on one side, SuperCollider(?)/who-knows-whatsis on the other. Formalism and its discontents. The title of Becker’s debut album, Traditional Music of Notional Species could apply equally well to his startlingly original take on sound/composition as to the projections of black manhood voiced by the ratchet MCs in Mustard’s camp, whose personas flourish thanks to the space-filled architectures he crafts underneath them with such golden ratio precision.

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Rashad Becker – Dances II

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I read four brilliant, odd books about pianos and/or tuning this year.

The most under-heralded & poetic of them is Anita Sullivan’s The Seventh Dragon: the Riddle of Equal Temperament (1986). If you want a lyrical mediation on piano tuning or simply a deeply weird-yet-unpretentious nonfiction book about sound, then this is your jam. Buy it directly from her!

Then there was dear László Krasznahorkai, an eerily gifted Hungarian writer who eyeballs the apocalypse with “a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” Melancholy of Resistance (1989, Eng. trans 2002) contains a great rant on piano tuning, whose importance is reflected in the title of Béla Tarr’s 2000 film adaptation: Werckmeister Harmonies.

In the sunset glow: Iain M. Banks’ The Hydrogen Sonata (2012). James Bridle first mentioned this one to me — an SF space opera whose central character grafted an additional pair of arms onto her body in order to play an impossibly difficult piece of music written for a spectacularly unwieldy instrument. This novel deals with civilizational senescence (alongside the musical musings), and was published only months before Banks’ tragic passing.

And last but not least, Thomas Bernard’s The Loser (1983, Eng. trans 2006), a novel I first wrote about when it was the Mudd Up Book Clubb selection. Be the Steinway, not the person playing the Steinway.

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Fact is, I spent much of 2013 listening to rap, r&b, and obscure American piano eccentrics. I invite you to spend some time with Charlemagne Palestine’s “Three Fifths in the Rhythm Three Against Two For Bosendorfer Piano” from 1974.

Six years ago Matt Shadetek & I (DJ Rupture) decided to start a record label. Madness. We’d returned to New York City the same season, after spending time in Berlin and Barcelona respectively. Dutty Artz began as a vehicle to release music that we were working on. Since then the DA family has grown, branched out, run, stumbled, and – thanks in large part to your support – keeps on going.

These days Dutty Artz is less a record label and more a grassroots experiment in creating cultural value in ways that challenge industry standards & dominant social norms, with dope music as our touchstone.

And we’re entering a new phase.

I’m pleased to announce that Chief Boima is now the CEO of Dutty Artz. Yes, we operate as a collective, but Boima is our motor making the big stuff happen. It’s not easy keeping us divergent headstrong folks on-point & efficient, so we couldn’t be happier that Boima’s here. He’s a badman DJ, a seasoned producer, and one of the best people to rap about the radical possibilities for cultural creation with. But the E stands for Executive – B gets things done like nobody else. Hold tight 2014.

Seriously – next year’s release schedule is our busiest to date, and this strong collection of tracks indicates where we’re heading. Six Years Deep unites DA extended family from Brooklyn to Cairo and beyond. Edge to edge.

Here’s my track-by-track breakdown:
No better way to kick off 2014 than with an original production by Uproot Andy tapped into the irresistible dembow sound. The Dembow riddim is as much about New York as Santo Domingo, and here Andy Adoboes it up with big room synth sauce rich enough to feed a horde of lesser DJs. It’s a worldwide ting.

Timely streetwise Auto-Croon maghranat / sha3by from Cairo. Read my Fader feature from 2012 to learn more about these guys making some of the most thrilling music in the world right now. This heater features scene leaders on the socially conscious tip, a song they first performed at a women’s rights rally in downtown Cairo.

From Egypt to Gyptian in one smooth step! Kush Aurora’s ethereal production makes sure that this downtempo reggae tune warms you up like a hot toddy. Slow & low.

“I’m like a—“ [hard cut] Ha! In just a few seconds of sound, Mexico City’s Lao spits out a sermon on dancefloor migration & redemptive sweat via Masters at Work and ballroom, wrapping the whole thing up in tribal guarachero’s post-Youtube rodeo/Aztek futurism. Any questions? Feel it. Here’s my 2010 feature on tribal + 3Ball MTY.

The Chief is busy at work producing an album for Sierra Leone’s Sorie Kondi; a few weeks ago I asked for beats for this movie I was scoring and B sent me two dozen quality jams like this one. Tip of the iceberg, folks. (Earlier this year we put out Kondi’s latest album).

OLD MONEY IS BETTER THAN NEW MONEYAND EVEN BITCOIN, but ask them about melanin as/& black power or simply wait for the new OM mixtape joint, out soon. The only time I saw anybody famous in NYC it was Beyoncé & Jay-Z. I have Scheme to thank: I was in the VIP area of this downtown party that Old Money brought me to. OM got that juice. For the record: Jay’s a cold-hearted clown, Bey is expectedly radiant, and I’m more convinced than ever that their marriage isn’t a marriage so much as a closet-friendly business merger.

FACT: I only log into Facebook to troll Grey Filastine. I was also the first person to release this gringo’s outward looking anarchocapitalist dance anthems. (The extremes meet, agree on libertarian precepts, and invest in BitCoin.) But this song! An extra beautiful Soot-era throwback jam blessed by Jessika Skeletalia Kenny’s phonetic Farsi vocals & Brent Arnold’s swooning cello stacks.

Kev is a young Nigerian rapper from Queens, part of Royal Kulture crew. I like this move, using rap to narrate a new immigrant courtliness.

Everybody chant: “more Ushka songs!” In this tune (her first?!) our hero chops up “Hanuma Vanama” (recital of the monkey) with Brooklyn Shanti, thereby sneaking a Sri Lankan folk tune into the club with a Bengali twist. Check their ‘What Edward Said’ mix for further brown power bounce.

A Spanish-language version of Depeche Mode’s “I Just Can’t Get Enough” from our Los Angeles correspondent. I had this on exclusive for awhile and every time I played it out people would ask me for the tune… GooglePayola must be broken because we gave them 1532 hours of immaterial labor and this track didn’t go viral. WTF? It is joy! But you saw the video, right? Rafi’s debut full-length drops on DA this January, get familiar.

I was only in Caracas briefly, but it struck me as the most f**-up place I’d ever visited, which is saying a lot. The Venezuelan political situation remains extra wild, just ask Mariana, Cardopusher, Algodon Egipcio, Pacheko, or any of our other homies from there — but one thing that the pressure cooker generates is some serious creativity. You can hear it in the dancefloor urgency of this song by M Peach, who bounces between Caracas and Brooklyn, hair aflame with ideas. La La Light It Up!

Galliano has been in the game since the late 90s, bringing Angolan kuduro artists to tour Europe and championing their sound from the beginning. As for this tune? Boima writes: “it’s a trusty club banger – primed for the naughtiest part of the night!”

Fresh sufferah lyrics from Kingston’s Trawma over future-fwd production by Matt Shadetek protégé Robzilla. Hauntingly good, with echoes of Mavado’s early work.

Africa Latina is the brainchild of Que Bajo boss-jefe Geko Jones. While the notorious vibes-springer may be known for redefining the sound of what it means to be young and latin@ in Nueva York, Geko has roots in dancehall & Floridean rave – just like Ponce de Leon! but that’s another story — which makes it even more surprising that what began as a club DJ duo with Boima is evolving into a full band. Soulful vocals in Lingala grace pointillistic guitar lines that sparkle like a broken iPhone screen. We might not deserve this unexpected beauty! Dear Africa Latina, more songs right now PLS.

Spacey Banjo Music From Berber Morocco Is Some Of The Best Music In The World. This is a new song by my good friend Hassan Wargui in Morocco, whose debut album we released in 2011. He played “Bo Nity” for me in an Agadir kitchen as we ran around researching my Maghrebi Auto-Tune rabbithole last summer. I got so excited I smashed a wine glass. Hassan finally managed to get “Bo Niyt” on tape for this comp. Follow Hassan’s YouTube and if you’re going to Casablanca, let us know, for real.

Last but not least let’s give a big round applause to our art director, Talacha, responsible for the Dutty Artz visuals.

By now you’ve heard of the extraordinary documentary, The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. Josh and I went to college together, and for a year or two we collaborated on wild art & activism projects. So, having helped out on his early work, it is particularly delightful to see The Act of Killing make such waves. The documentary challenges audiences and receives well-deserved critical acclaim everywhere it goes, and, even more impressively, back in Indonesia it opened up space for political discussion where there had been decades of media silence.

Here’s the trailer in case you haven’t seen it yet. In the middle video Josh explains what happened with the film in Indonesia, from the massive amounts of investigative journalism that it sparked to organizing invite-only screenings to avoid getting it banned. Incredible stuff. After that, big dogs Errol Morris (“I think there’s some inherent madness in this approach.”) and Werner Herzog explain why they find Josh’s film so powerful.